The Definitive Guide to Salesforce Sandboxes

Sandboxes are copies of your environments for development, testing, and training that prevent the compromising of the data and applications in your production environment. Broadly speaking, there are three types of environments:

Environments

Development Environments – Salesforce.com environments where you can extend, integrate, and develop on Force.com without affecting your production environments

Test Environments – These can be Production or Development Environments specifically used for testing application functionality before deploying to production or releasing to customers

Sandbox Types

The sandbox types are:

Developer Sandbox – Developer sandboxes are intended for coding and testing. These environments include a copy of your production organization’s metadata or Setup data.

Developer Pro Sandbox – Developer Pro sandboxes are intended for coding and testing. These environments include a copy of your production organization’s metadata or Setup data. They have a larger storage limit than Developer sandboxes, which allows for more robust test data sets, and enables this environment to handle more development and quality assurance tasks.

Partial Copy Sandbox – Partial Copy sandboxes are intended to be used as testing environments. These environments can be used for quality assurance tasks such as user acceptance testing, integration testing, and training. These environments include a copy of your production organization’s metadata, or Setup data, and a subset of your production data as defined by a sandbox template.

Full Sandbox – Full sandboxes are intended to be used as testing environments. These environments are the only ones that can support full performance testing, load testing, and staging in addition to the tasks that you use other sandboxes for. These environments are a replica of your production organization, including all data—for example, object records and attachments—and metadata.